Daniel Pink argues AI can generate endless content but can't judge what's good, since it just predicts the next word without caring about quality. Since ChatGPT, publishing has flooded with new books of declining average quality. Creatives should stop competing on volume and instead out-judge machines.
Everybody needs to calm down. AI isn't coming for creative people. It can't function without them, and almost nobody's noticed. Here's the thing. AI can spin out 1,000 options in a second, so it looks all-powerful, but making options was never the hard part. Knowing which one is good, that's the hard part, and that's the one thing AI can't do. It has no taste. It can't tell brilliant from garbage, and it actually doesn't care. It just predicts the next word. So it hands you 100 choices, but it still needs a human to point to the Publishing already shows this phenomenon. Since ChatGPT came on the scene, new book releases have nearly tripled, and over half are now made by AI. But the average quality of those books fell. The writers who knew what good looked like, those were the ones who rose to the top. 20 years ago, in A Whole New Mind, I said a shift was coming. We had to automate routine work, and judgment was becoming the rare thing. So stop trying to outproduce the machine. You'll lose. Outjudge it. AI is the tool. You're the standard that's missing, and you're the one thing it can't work without.
